If you feel like there’s no good place to get up-to-the-minute, accurate breaking news anymore, allow me to recommend my personal favorite source: group chats with women.

Specifically, women between the ages of 35 and 45—this demographic is almost over-engaged on a broad range of topics, from politics to product recalls. They’re young enough to disbelieve what they hear on cable news but old enough to disbelieve what they see on TikTok. They’re how I found out Gorbachev died and that I could skip seeing The Zone of Interest. And in terms of trend forecasting, they can’t be beat—when two or more of my group chats begin circling the same topic, I know it’s officially gone from “in the ether” to “bona fide phenomenon.” This is how I know that married women everywhere are getting spectacularly horny for divorce.

I don’t mean that all my friends and acquaintances are in bad marriages. And lots of women engage in Sliding Doors, if-I-were-single talk during a night out. But in the past couple of months, talking about divorce—who’s getting one and who wants one—has exploded, so much so that I’m surprised it’s not surging as a category on PornHub. It’s less your garden-variety complaining about husbands than actively pondering it with lust. As my divorced friend says, “Married women ask me about being divorced the way closeted men are interested in how gay guys do sex.”

You need only look as far as the recent virality of women writing about divorce. There are divorce memoirs, divorce essays, and almost-divorce essays by women, each of which blows up my text chains afresh, sort of like how Fifty Shades of Grey (allegedly!) made housewives start buying rope from hardware stores.

A few months ago, a book by a relatively unknown author went around my extended friend group like the flu. It was a spiky-haired novelist’s memoir about the dissolution of her marriage to a male writer (to summarize: he’s less successful, he cheats, she finds out she’s way better off without him). It was blurbed by some literary cool girls, but neither the writer nor her husband is a household name. The book wasn’t a massive hit or even a best-seller—in fact, it’s ranked in the 900s in Amazon’s “divorce” category. (No. 1 is the decidedly less sexy-sounding book of affirmations called You’re Going to Make It!) Yet for a month or so, it was a micro-hit among my married friends, who were feverishly reading it and posting about it. It had the kind of “ooh, you should read this” word of mouth that felt almost old-fashioned and extremely rare.

You might wonder where the entertainment value is in all this misery, and I think that while a big part is the googling (I always immediately sleuth out the identity of the evil-coded-yet-tastefully-unnamed ex-husband), the rest is about the fantasy. All the women in these books are having a great fucking time getting divorced. These are tales less of woe than of freedom won, self-care achieved, and good-for-her triumph with enthusiasm usually reserved for dolphins being re-released into the sea.

Men can and do write similar books, though not as much. And women have the market cornered on the euphoric divorce, where breaking up wasn’t just the right thing to do but the best thing that ever happened to them. All this reading about other people’s marriages and dissecting their endings in our group chats seems to have gotten my friends very hot and bothered. It’s left me to wonder, Whoa, this used to be the part of dinner where we talked about how we like getting choked a little. What happened?

Divorce was once seen as a last resort, but now women are starting to talk about it like it’s … well, a resort. Margaritaville comes to mind. When my friends furtively bring it up, it’s almost always prefaced with the obligatory “I love my husband, but … ” or “We’re actually really happy, but … ” Then they’ll often continue in what amounts to a platonic female version of dirty talk. One friend recently admitted that at night, she lies in bed, thinking about how she’d decorate a one-bedroom apartment. Another married friend raised the ante and said she has a private fantasy about spending her last years with her best female friends instead of her spouse. It doesn’t help that all the women we know who’ve gotten divorced seem to thrive, and not remarry, like they’ve finally found “Flavor Country.”

Being 45 and freshly divorced seems as “sexy” in 2024 as being 33 and married to your shoe closet did 20 years ago. A middle-aged woman with a good job and no husband is an object of envy to married women, even if she’s not having any sex. A man in the same situation? A cautionary tale about not going to therapy. We’ve come a long way from Loretta Lynn’s ballads about being cast out by her female friends and goosed on the fanny by their husbands, or Kramer vs. Kramer, where divorce is depicted as the demesne of cold women who don’t want to make their adorable moppets French toast. Consider the way we view frustrated women shedding their partners now, and it’s odd that we ever lived in a world where we were supposed to side with Robin Williams over Sally Field in the Mrs. Doubtfire split. (Maybe that was just me, wanting to have live goats at my birthday parties.)

Here’s where I put the inevitable disclaimer: not all married women. Including myself. I’m a 40-year-old woman in a heterosexual marriage, and I don’t want to get a divorce. I like being married, and there’s no one I’d rather be with than my husband (and probably nobody else who would deal with my specific set of psychological and time-management issues). I’m the kind of person who brings a carbon-monoxide detector to a sexy hotel weekend, which is not something you can get away with around someone who isn’t legally bound to you. When I head off on a huffy walk or go pick up pizza just to have some “alone time,” I will almost instantly text my husband out of reflex to share some stupid license plate I saw on a Tesla I almost hit. This negates the whole point of alone time, I guess, but I do understand it and even crave it, if it seems I don’t really want any.

But I don’t want to protest too much. One of the reasons I feel O.K. saying that I get the sex appeal of divorce is that my husband and I have joked about it, together. We have three kids under seven. One of our close friends is amicably, happily divorced with a week-on, week-off custody arrangement, which we’ve talked about with almost erotic longing. We love our children and each other, but the idea of a week of uninterrupted solitude sounds admittedly … I dunno. Restful? Nice? Sensual?

A divorced friend recently weighed in on the phenomenon, seeming irritated by the fixation. Her married friends ask her about her life with a pervert’s zest for detail, even though she’s certain they’d never pull the trigger on breaking up themselves. And naturally none of our friends’ masturbatory ideation takes into account the stress or expense of divorce, and how emotionally grueling it can be for everybody involved. A lot of the books leave out exactly that un-fun part while keeping in all the hot stuff, like installing a claw-foot tub and letting your bush go gray.

I suspect that for many of my girlfriends, it’s a fleeting impulse, or a little emotional mystery that grabs your interest, then lets go. Something risky and racy that could be life-changing or filled with drama and regret, like polyamory or Lasik. For others, it’s just a proxy for freedom: the same way you might pine for the apartment you had when you were 22 and only had to care for yourself. But you probably don’t really want to go back, because it was actually pretty hard, when you think about it. And nothing spoils a fantasy like thinking.

Julieanne Smolinski is a Los Angeles–based TV writer